Where the Heart Is

by Annie Groves

  Now she had done it. Lou was bound to retaliate with a nasty comment about Bobby saying something, like he wasn’t a part of the family so he had no right to comment. Sasha had been warned by her mother not to rub Lou up the wrong way by going on to her about Bobby because in Lou’s eyes he had come between them.

  Poor Sasha couldn’t understand her own behaviour. She was saying the kind of things, behaving in the kind of challenging way that in the past would have been Lou’s chosen role. Now her mother had a small anxious crease between her eyebrows and her father was frowning heavily, whilst Grace was giving Seb one of those stupid married looks that said quite plainly how much she disapproved of what Sasha had done.

  A horrible feeling was twisting angrily inside her, a sort of hot miserable pain that was driving her to be even more cross and outspoken, and yet at the same time also made her want to burst into tears and beg Lou to forgive her. What was happening to her? Sasha wasn’t used to Lou getting so much approval and praise. It had always been Lou who had been the one who provoked others, and who always caused the trouble they had both so often ended up in, not her.

  It was Jean who spoke first, not just surprised but also a little bit cross with Sasha for spoiling the happy mood of Lou’s homecoming, and after everything she had said to her about not mentioning Bobby as well. Jean had thought better of Sasha, she really had, and now because of that, her voice was quite sharp.

  ‘That’s quite enough, Sasha.’

  Lou could almost feel her twin’s misery and immediately wanted to protect and defend her but, more than that, she discovered a little to her own surprise, she didn’t want her family making her out to be something she wasn’t, especially not at Sasha’s expense, so she spoke up quickly, admitting without heat, ‘Actually, the truth is, Mum, Bobby is sort of right. I wasn’t doing anything wrong or breaking any rules in being where I was, but the reason that I was up so early in the morning and on my own was because that trouble I’d got into had affected all the other girls in my hut as well.’

  Quickly she explained about the points, then turned to Sasha.

  ‘So you can tell Bobby that he was right, but do tell him too that I have well and truly learned my lesson. I felt dreadful knowing that the other girls were being punished because of me. It made me think of how often you’d been punished along with me, Sash, when we were young, and yet you never complained or told on me. I’m so lucky to have such a loyal and wonderful twin.’

  There was a moment’s emotional silence from the whole room and then Seb said firmly, ‘As a fellow member of the RAF, well done, young Lou. I’m proud to share the uniform with you.’

  Seb’s warm-hearted words broke the dam of startled silence that had gripped them all, but it was her father who said the words that nearly made Lou disgrace herself with silly tears.

  ‘Well, I always knew that you must have at least some of your mother in you, despite everything, but I never thought to see you prove it like you have done now, Louise Campion.’

  Taking advantage of the situation, Lou asked Jean, ‘Mum, is it all right if me and Sasha go upstairs and have a proper chat? I promise I won’t bully her into putting on any records.’

  Everyone except Sasha laughed at Lou’s referenceto her youthful habit of insisting on playing the gramophone records she and Sasha had loved to dance to at maximum volume, as Jean nodded in agreement.

  ‘It seems ever so strange seeing you in uniform,’ Sasha said awkwardly once they were upstairs in their shared bedroom.

  ‘Does it? I feel strange now when I’m not wearing it,’ Lou responded equably, sitting down on her old bed and then adding warmly, ‘I like being in the WAAF but I’ve missed you ever such a lot, Sash.’

  ‘Well, I hope you aren’t going to try to persuade me to join up.’

  Sasha’s voice was deliberately hostile, but instead of being provoked into a quarrel as the old Lou would have been, Lou merely laughed and answered, ‘No. I can see now that it was wrong of me to always want you to do what I wanted to do.’ She reached for her twin’s hand. ‘I know you like working at the exchange and living here at home with Mum and Dad, and going out with Bobby, but—’

  Sasha pulled her hand free. ‘But you don’t approve. Well, I don’t care. Bobby means a lot to me. He saved my life, after all, don’t forget.’

  Lou looked at her twin. She could have pointed out that she too had done her part in saving her twin’s life and the old Lou would have done so, oblivious to the fact that her insistence on her role being recognised would only further antagonise her twin.

  Her coming home and being treated like a heroine had upset Sasha, she could tell, but herown new-found maturity told her that saying so would only make the situation worse.

  ‘I know I was a difficult about you and Bobby before I went away, Sash, but that was because I felt jealous. I didn’t want you to want to be with him more than you wanted to be with me.’ Lou smiled at her own immaturity. ‘If you like him then that’s all that matters, and it’s certainly good enough for me.’

  Sasha was eyeing her suspiciously. ‘You don’t mean that,’ she accused Lou. ‘You wanted me to be in trouble. You always did.’

  Lou felt dreadfully guilty that she was the cause of Sasha’s angry upset, and sad too–sad for Sash and sad for herself. It was as though in some peculiar way they had changed places, Lou realised, the thought making her frown slightly.

  ‘I always wanted you to be in trouble with me,’ she agreed. ‘I wanted us to do everything together, but I never wanted to just get you into trouble, Sash. I was always the bad twin, and you were the good one.’

  ‘And now because you’re the good one, that means that I’m the bad one.’

  ‘No,’ Lou denied. ‘I’m still me, Sash, and I expect I’ll always be too impatient and too impulsive, and that I’ll have to stop and think about what you’d do instead of rushing into things. I love being in the WAAF and doing what I’m doing and I’m determined to make a go of it, and that’s going to take discipline, I know, but that doesn’t mean that you and I have to change places. We can both be good, can’t we?’ she appealed, reaching out for Sasha’shand again, adding ruefully, ‘Although, of course, you will always be naturally more “good” than me.’

  Lou could feel the resistance in Sasha’s silence and the stiffness of her hand.

  ‘Sash, we always said that we’d never let what happened to Mum and Auntie Vi happen to us, remember?’ Lou appealed to her twin.

  ‘That wasn’t Mum’s fault. It was Auntie Vi’s. She changed, Mum always said, just like you’ve changed.’

  Lou’s heart dropped. Sasha was still angry with her, she knew, and, for all her sweetness, Sasha could be determinedly stubborn when she wished. She might be slower to impatience and irritation, but Sasha was also slower to forgive and forget, Lou knew.

  ‘It’s all right for you, coming home and having everyone make a fuss of you because you’re a heroine, but you’ll soon be up to your old tricks, trying to put me off Bobby and make me do what you want. I know you, Lou.’

  This time it was Lou who released Sasha’s hand, her voice quiet and sad. ‘No you don’t, Sash. Not any more.’

  ‘So what about you taking me out now for this dinner you keep on promising me?’ Eva suggested archly to Con.

  She’d come out of her dressing room just as he’d been on his way past and Con could see that he wasn’t going to get away with an excuse. She’d been pursuing him very determinedly from the moment she’d arrived, and Con had done his bestto keep her sweet, whilst at the same time keeping her at a distance.

  ‘You can come and wait for me in my dressing room. It won’t take me long to get changed.’

  Eva hooked her arm through his. She’d got a grip like a wrestler, Con decided, as she was more of less dragged him into her dressing room and then closed the door, clasping both her hands to her breast as she stood blocking his exit.

  ‘At last we are alone, just as we have both longed to be,’ she
told him emotionally. ‘I have seen your desire for me in your eyes when you look at me. I have waited a long time for a man like you to come into my life.’

  She was no shrinking virgin, Con was just thinking, when, as though she had read his mind, Eva told him, ‘I cannot pretend that there have not been occasions when I have allowed myself to believe that other men, lesser men than you, have deceived me with their false promises of love, only for me to discover that they were not worthy of me. I am a woman, after all, the passionate daughter of a very passionate man. He was a knife thrower in a circus and he was so passionate, in fact, that he killed my mother out of his love for her when he believed she had been unfaithful to him.’

  Con tried not to shudder. Intense emotions were something he always tried to avoid. The passion and thrill for him in a love affair came from pursuing his prey, and charming them until they succumbed to him.

  ‘I still have the knife with which my father killedmy mother. I carry it with me always. Would you like to see it?’

  Con started to shake his head, but Eva obviously wasn’t going to let him refuse. She put her foot on the stool in front of her dressing table, which was littered with pots and sticks of stage make-up giving off its familiar smell of greasepaint under the hot lights illuminating the mirror. The robe she was wearing fell back to reveal her surprisingly good legs. She was wearing silk stockings, her suspenders attached to a sturdy-looking corset, around the waist of which she had on a narrow leather belt, with a sheath from which she produced a knife.

  Just watching the way she gripped it made Con feel nervous. Despite his height and breadth of shoulder, Con was a physical coward who avoided confrontation and violence whenever he could.

  Eva was smiling as she ran her thumb tip down the edge of the knife in a loving gesture.

  ‘This knife reminds me of my father and the passionate nature he passed on to me. Any man who arouses those passions and then deceives me will answer to my father’s knife.’

  That was the trouble with these artistes, they were always so dramatic, Con thought irritably, but the sight of the knife, which Eva was now returning to its sheath, had made him feel apprehensive, and all the more so because of what Eva was implying.

  Con was so worried about the knife that when Eva reached for him he didn’t react fast enoughand ended up with his hand being placed on her silk stocking-clad ankle and held there.

  ‘You have such wonderful hands, so large and manly.’ Her voice a throaty purr, Eva urged Con’s hand up her leg.

  It wasn’t his fault that he was unable to stop himself from automatically stroking her flesh. He was a man, after all, so used to the pleasure of caressing chorus girls’ limbs that it just came naturally to do so.

  ‘Ah, your touch is too much for me to resist. You are seducing away my self-control. I cannot deny you.’

  The theatrical magnificence of these words, delivered in a voice throbbing with feeling, whilst Eva threw back her head and placed her free hand against her brow, might be lost on Con, but their meaning certainly wasn’t.

  Another couple of minutes and they’d pass the point of no return, and he’d be far more involved with Eva than he wanted to be. He tried to pull away, but Eva’s hand was trapping his against the warmly moist inside of her thigh.

  ‘I know what you are asking me for when you look at me like that. I know what you are compelling me to give you. I confess I cannot refuse such a man as you … so very much of a man.’

  With one lightning move, Eva had fully opened her robe and was reaching into Con’s groin, her hand going straight to his balls, which she proceeded to massage with expertise. The movement of her body caused her breasts, which pouted over the top of her corset, to tremble so much thatthey reminded Con of the way the pink blancmanges that his sister Alice made for her brood of children quivered after she had turned them out on a plate.

  ‘Ah, but your little man is so impatient for me. I can feel him pleading for us to release him from his torment. Let us not waste another second in coming together in our love for one another …’

  Con exhaled in relief as he stepped into the welcome dimness of the theatre, via the stage door.

  When he had woken up this morning with a pounding headache, he hadn’t even known where he was at first, never mind who he was with, and it had been a shock to turn over in the unfamiliar double bed and find Eva next to him, naked and snoring slightly.

  Slowly everything had come back to him. After the inevitable had happened in her dressing room, she had insisted that he took her out for a meal. They’d ended up not in one of the cheap cafés Con favoured, but in a new nightclub that had only recently opened up in the city to cater for the influx of men in uniforms looking for somewhere to spend their money when they were on leave. Its interior had been discreetly dark, its dance floor very small and its prices very high.

  Eva had insisted on ordering champagne, which had cost him twenty pounds, so that they could toast their love for one another, and Con had had a fight to get her away from the place before she ordered a second bottle. Then she’d threatened him with hysterics when he’d suggestedthat she could see herself back to her digs, and he’d had to go with her just to stop her from screeching. Once there, she’d produced a bottle of whisky, and then she’d matched him drink for drink, somehow managing to stay sober whilst he had not. And then … She certainly knew what she was doing when it came to the bedroom, Con acknowledged with admiration. He’d been tempted to stay with her and those magnificent breasts of hers this morning, but he didn’t want her getting even more of the wrong idea than she already had. All that talk of love made him feel distinctly wary. She’d even been talking about moving in with him. He might not have thanked her for it at the time, but he’d been pretty relieved this morning that he had those billetees his wife, Emily, had let the council fill the house with as an excuse for insisting that Eva stayed where she was. She’d obviously fallen for him, and Con couldn’t blame her for that. She wasn’t the first woman to have done so and she wouldn’t be the last. He hummed under his breath and then stopped as the pain from his aching head increased, wincing as he started to climb the stairs to the cubbyhole that was his office.

  ‘Morning, Con.’ Ricky smiled widely at Con.

  Con stared in disbelief at the American, who was sprawled in Con’s own chair, his feet on Con’s own desk, whilst smoking one of Con’s cigars.

  ‘What the ruddy hell’s going on?’ Con demanded.

  No one, but no one, was allowed into his office when he wasn’t there, and as for sitting in his chairwith their feet on his desk, displaying a loucheness that Con had claimed for himself …

  ‘You mustn’t blame your boys, Con,’ Ricky informed him, giving Con the answer to the question he had not yet asked. ‘Like you they couldn’t resist getting their hands on some of Uncle Sam’s money.’

  There was a look in the hard, almost black, eyes that sent a sharp thrill of alarm through Con as he made a mental note to deal with Stu and Paul later.

  ‘If you’re talking about last night’s card game, everything was fair and square, you said so yourself,’ Con responded, struggling to look relaxed whilst his hangover pounded.

  ‘Sure I did, but that hasn’t stopped Chip bad-mouthing you to the other guys at the camp. You don’t mind if I give you a bit of advice, do you, Con?’ Without waiting for Con to reply, Ricky leaned back in Con’s chair, his hands folded behind his head as he told him, ‘The way I see it is that it would have been a better move not to have done the kid twice over. Guys talk, y’know.’

  ‘It isn’t my fault that lady luck was with me and not with him,’ Con blustered. He was increasingly anxious and eager to get the American out of his office and out of his life.

  Ricky laughed and removed his feet from Con’s desk, getting up and coming round to stand in front of it.

  ‘Lady luck, eh? Come on, Con, it wasn’t lady luck that was responsible for you winning. We both know that.’

  ‘I don
’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t have to listen to this,’ Con told him.

  ‘Sure you do–if you want to keep on fleecing raw soldiers. I’ve got to say that I’ve seen plenty of guys palm cards in my time but you sure do it nicely. Real neat. Hey, Con there’s no point in looking at me like that. We both know what’s going on. I’ve been asking around and I reckon you’re making twenty-five bucks or so a game. Peanuts. You could be making five times that. What you’re doing now is amateur stuff; you need to think professional.’

  A hundred and twenty-five pounds? Con couldn’t help but feel dizzy with excitement at the prospect of so much money.

  ‘Of course you’d need help–a partner. A guy who can drop a word here and there, and make sure the guys keep on coming, and that any fuss they make afterwards is smoothed over. I like you, Con, and I reckon you and me could work a really good deal here. What d’you say? I reckon a partnership with us splitting the profit sixty-forty is a pretty good offer.’

  Sixty-forty?’ Con queried, ‘Eighty-twenty would be more like it.’

  The American laughed. ‘OK, if you’re willing to give me another twenty per cent, then—’

  ‘Give you another twenty per cent? I’m the one who’ll be getting eighty per cent,’ Con announced angrily.

  Who did Ricky think he was, trying to take over?

  ‘Look, buddy I don’t think you quite understand,’ Ricky said softly. ‘You’ve made some big mistakes, and you could find yourself in a hell of a lot of trouble if guys like Chip go complaining about some theatre manager ripping them off in card games. You could find that some of the guys decide to take it into their own hands to come and have a word with you. Be a pity if that handsome face of yours got beat to a pulp.’

  Con started to sweat.